smorgan wrote: > Those are very much parallel, and I really don't think I've > misrepresented either case.
The way you have put it is an interesting one, and made me think deeply. After consideration, I think one difference is as follows: the strategy we are using with quirks mode is what we do when we've lost a battle. The strategy we have (up to now) been using with user agents is what we do when we are still fighting. Marquee might be one example. For several years, we were fighting. We won in a lot of areas. But the decision was taken that we'd lost in the Far East, and that we needed to make the compatibility concession. So we now have (limited) support for marquee. We started off using one set of tactics, then later we moved to the other set. In other web compatibility cases, such as e.g. reflecting all IDs into the top-level namespace (an IE quirk), we haven't had to give in. So the question comes down to: is this already a battle we've given up as lost? In the case of user agent sniffing, we haven't really even been fighting the battle all that much - and we've still pretty much won it. We can argue back and forth all day about how many site there are out there doing the wrong thing, but there are a heck of a lot of sites out there doing the _right_ thing. And for the others, the fix is pretty simple in most cases - s/Firefox/Gecko/. So if we took up our swords in earnest, we might make real progress. I don't think we can call this one lost just yet. Perhaps that's where we disagree. I've always argued that telling the Camino team to just suck it up is not really a good answer. I was hoping we could find some TE resource to come to your aid, although I admit I haven't yet been successful in that. --- A further thought: another important difference is the effect on people authoring _new_ pages. Standards mode has benefits - consistent rendering and so on - that mean people want to use it. But to do so, they have to give up their quirks. So even in the "we've lost" mode, there is a hope for a better future. However, with the UA change, that's not present. We know from bitter experience that when things get into general use in UA strings, they get stuck there. There's no incentive to wean people off bad behaviours. Gerv _______________________________________________ dev-tech-layout mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-layout
